Consumption metrics. Measuring the amount of people that are consuming your content, the channels they’re using, and how often they’re consuming it.

Sharing metrics. Measures what content is being shared, who’s sharing it, how they’re sharing it, and how often it’s happening.

Lead metrics. Measures how the content is supporting demand generation and lead nurturing.

Sales metrics. Measures how the content is influencing the advancement of leads through the sales funnel and, ultimately, how it’s driving revenue.

Once you’re able to communicate how you’re going to track results, you’ll also want to identify for them how you’re going to maximize ROI from the content that you’ll be producing.

Stage 3 – Execute

This stage needs to answer the question of how you’re going to execute your content marketing strategy.

What processes are you going to use? Who is going to do the work?

What in-house teams are you going to be collaborating with? Do you plan on utilizing contractors or agencies to help create the content?

These are all questions that you’re going to need to answer.

How you execute will obviously depend on the resources you have at your disposal.

For example, HubSpot recommends that a marketing team of nine could execute their strategy by divvying up responsibilities like this:

This execution strategy involves two employees focused on blogging, one focused on premium/long-form content, one on SEO, and one on design.

Their job would be to commit to content marketing activities that grow the top of your sales funnel.

The other four would be dedicated to converting and closing the leads that they bring in.

Every situation is unique, and you’ll have to get creative if you don’t have access to a large team of marketers that can contribute.

The important thing here is that you have a ready made plan in place to show the executives how you’re going to follow through with your content marketing strategy.

3. Clearly Differentiated Between Advertising and Content

Worby realized early on that, for many reasons, it was important that they were able to clearly differentiate between advertising and content.

They had a simple model for doing this.

Advertising was defined as anything that was led by the brand. This included anything that was implemented for the purpose of showcasing the brand.

Content, on the other hand, was defined as anything that was led by the audience. This included anything that was meant to demonstrate the brand.

By doing this, Worby’s team simplified the process of identifying which pieces of content could be measured as part of the content marketing ROI.

It also created a common language that the entire organization could use to differentiate between the two.

Tying it All Together

As you’re already aware, it takes a lot of work to get the executives in your organization to buy-in to content marketing.

But, as Gill Worby has proven, it can be accomplished.

Utilize the process that Worby and her team have laid out for you.

Commit to going after complete buy-in by everyone in your organization. Educate, evaluate, and execute.

Create a clear understanding about the difference between advertising and content.

Do these things, show the execs that content marketing isn’t “too hard to define,” and implement a content marketing strategy that can transform your organization’s relationship with consumers.

It will be well worth the ride.

Julia McCoy is a top 30 content marketer and has been named an industry thought leader by several publications. She enjoys making the gray areas of content marketing clear with practical training, teaching, and systems. Her career in content marketing was completely self-taught. In 2011, she dropped out of college to follow her passion in writing, and since then grew her content agency, Express Writers, to thousands of worldwide clients from scratch. Julia is the author of two bestselling books on content marketing and copywriting, and is the host of The Write Podcast. Julia writes as a columnist on leading publications and certifies content strategists in her training course, The Content Strategy & Marketing Course. Julia lives in Austin, Texas with her daughter, husband, and one fur baby.